HP Pavilion dv1000 user reviews

5.0 stars

"Best value 13" to 14" notebooks" on February 28, 2005 by jonathan9113

Pros: light weight, price, QuickPlay DVD withous Windows, customer service and support

Cons: Touch pad not centered between 2 hands

Summary: This laptop is light for a 14" screen. At 5.5 pound, I belief is the lightest in the 14" class. I have compared many brands and returned 2 laptops, that will give you an idea how much time I spend evaluating laptops. First look at the screen. DV1000 screen brightness level is about the same as Sony, Fujitsu, IBM and Dell when viewed at a 90 degree angle. At 45 degree angle the Fujitsu Brightview is about 10% brighter than the Sony Xbrite. The the Sony Xbrite screen is about 10% brighter than the rest of the laptops. I am comparing all the bright screen laptops and not the anti-glare screen laptops. I prefer the bright screen with slightly reflective screen than the anti-glare screen. The reason is, it is about 20% brighter at night and 300% brighter under sunlight compared to the anti-glare screen. You can work on your laptop with the sun shinning directly on the screen. The anti-glare screen has a sand blast finish and when sun light hits, the screen gets washed out. I would highly recommend the bright reflective screen. I don't think the reflection will bother anyone just don't angle the screen to the ceiling or the sky. I know that the video card shares system memory but it does not have any effect on me. I run Excel, Photoshop and Word mostly, so I think DV1000 is a very practical design for me. This memory saving design is one of the many reasons why the DV1000 is the best in value. Oh, processing speed is plenty fast for my application. The Quickplay feature is ingenuous, it can play movie without Windows and the batteries lasted for about 2:45 minutes compared to 2:15 if you use the Windows with the CPU on. Get the DVD remote control, it is only $15 and the bluetooth especially. Finally you need a MS bluetooth mouse to put the final touch to a almost perfect laptop. The Microsoft bluetooth mouse is the best mouse that I have used out of scores of mouse I tried. The AA batteries in the mouse lasted for weeks and you hardly worry about recharging. Oh, I forgot the stereo sound of the DV1000 is much more superior to the 13" Sony laptop which has very poor sound quality when playing movies. The DV1000 has the speakers up front so you can hear them loud and clear even with the screen closed. I have returned the Sony 13" which Sony charged me shipping both ways and the Fujitsu 14" with the regular screen. I have also returned the DV1000 with the anti-glare screen which HP paid for shipping both ways. I finally kept the DV1000 with the Clearview bright screen in the end. Do get the DVD 8x burner if you burn DVD, the 4x DVD burner is incompatible with some 4x DVD-R. Always use Hibernation button to turn off any laptops, your system boots up 2 times faster. The only things I have not tested are games which I grew tired off. I almost forgot about the keyboard. Because of the wider screen, DV1000 keyboard is wider than the 13" laptop keyboard therefore much easier to type. The down side is it is one pound heavier which I don't mind. Ya, do get the 2 year warranty even though you think it is a rip off and you may never use it. The reason is that it includes XP windows support and help on software installation in the future. If you don't buy it the software support is only 3 month and not one year. HP has great customer service, unlike Sony, HP doesn't do finger pointing when a third party software does not run or install properly. This tells you a lot about how Sony treats the customers. Sony quality is good but not the best, it is just a lot of advertising. You need to be objective and not get brain washed by Sony. Talk about money, buy 256 mb memory on Ebay, it is much cheaper but make sure it is laptop memory. I only take 3 minutes to put it in. At the time I wrote this review I would say that the HP DV1000 is about the best choice for multiple applications which take into account portability, speed, price, features and quality. Enough said, this is my 100 hours of experience with all the research, testing, trial & error. Hope this will help you to select the right laptop in the future.

4.5 stars

"Great value" on February 24, 2005

Pros: Went through 4 laptops and finally kept this one. I am very meticulous about equipments and especially laptops which I use 8 hours a day. This laptop is light, widescreen and can be ordered with bluetooth. Sony and Fujitsu, Xbright and Clearview screens a

Cons: The touch pad could be better centrally located below the G and the H keys instead of the H and J keys so that the right hand does not accidently touch it. The touch pad in now exactly center on the laptop but not centered on the home key position.

1.5 stars

"Exellent value, excellent support, horrific quality" on September 30, 2005 by apell

Pros: Ideal feature set, esepecially for the price

Cons: Quality, quality, and quality; incompetent warranty repair

Summary: About me: as a professional screenwriter, moderately computer-literate, and extremely anal about taking the time to find the perfect product, I was looking for the optimim balance between functionality and portability, exceptional battery life, and a good mix of basic productivity and wireless communications functionality for the price. After going to Best Buy to physically look at the shapes & sizes I had to choose from (which I strongly recommend for any laptop buyer), I decided that the 14" widescreen display was perfect, and compared to the very few other brands offering that size, HP just blew them out of the water in features for the money.

First, the good:

The machine looks cool, comes with cool features like a remote control (which I actually use when I hook up my dv1000 to my home A/V system & use it as a jukebox).

It's a good weight, and since I tend to spread out horizontally & want lots of working area without taking up the entire table at Starbucks, the screen shape & size were ideal for my needs.

The performance is adequate, not stellar (forget playing the latest games with that Intel graphics card), the wireless reception is excellent compared with any laptop of any brand I've used, and the battery life for the extended-life battery (easily exceeding 4 hours without even dimming the screen) is superb.

Lastly, the customer service and tech support *representatives* (we'll get to the actual service in a sec) are extremely friendly and helpful.

Now, the ugly:

One minor gripe and one catastrophic deal-breaker. The minor gripe is with the fit-and-finish. The machine looks great in photos, but its plastic 'immitation metal' and several other cheap touches are a bit disappointing in person. Overall, to anyone within 5 feet of your machine, it'll look like you cheaped-out to save money. But for the price and all its other benefits, who cares?

Now for the deal-breaker: my first unit arrived with a burned-out pixel. Not so great for a computer they're marketing for portable video applications. After packing it up, shipping it back to HP (I had customized mine on HP.com), getting the run-around on the phone for over an hour about whether I'd get the same deal I got on the first machine, waiting another few days for the next machine, and finally getting it, guess what? Another burned-out pixel. Packing it back up again, shipping it back again, and getting bounced from one customer service rep to another again, this time in a much nastier mood, I finally ordered a third one (just bc there still wasn't any other machine I wanted, and I figured, hey, what are the odds?), waited, finally received a machine with 100% functioning pixels.

Unfortunately, the saga continues. Ten months after receiving my 3rd machine and really thorougly enjoying it the entire time, I developed a motherboard issue which forced me to repair my HD, then repair my Windows at least once a day. I sent it back (still 2 months left on the warranty) with a comprehensive, typed description of the problem, its triggers, the error messages I saw, etc... I also stressed that the problem seemed to involve heat and heavy hard drive or CPU use and would probably work when they first got it despite the obviously severe problem it has. I also included my cell # and told them they could call me as often as they wanted as long as they fixed the damn thing. 7 days later, with no computer to use the entire time, I get my dv1000 back with an invoice saying "problem couldn't be replicated." Nothing was fixed.

So now that the problem has returned and the machine I depend on for my livelihood is non-functioning, tech support suggests that I send it back, live without a computer for another 7 days, be content with their assurance that they'll "try to make sure it doesn't happen again."

My other option is to eat the cost of this machine which only worked for 10 months (versus my 6 year-old Dell laptop which has never had a single problem and still works), and save my time deailing with a warranty that's obviouisly intended to avoid making costly repairs.

Conclusion:

Overall, the design, features, and customer service for the machine are excellent. But since it's now totally non-functional after 10 months and HP is clearly unwilling to take its warranty commitments seriously, I really, really, really wish I had bought a Dell or a Sony. Having gonen to college in Palo Alto, I had always thought of HP a a blue-chip brand. Now, there's no way I'll ever buy another HP product in my life.

Good luck to everyone in their search, and I hope you end up making a much better decision than I did.

4.5 stars

"Great notebook, CNET review has some details wrong" on January 29, 2005

Pros: Finally, a multimedia notebook that's actually mobile (that's under $2000)! Personally, all the 15" and 15.4" notebooks are just too big to lug around. Quickview. Awesome. Watch DVD's or listen to CD's without booting the machine. With two built-in h

Cons: I wish hp would have used the 855GME chipset, instead of 855GM. I would have liked to be able to use PC2700 SDRAM instead of PC2100. Now, in reality, the perceieved performance of the notebook is just fine, it's just the bithead in me knowing that one m